When more than 160 playwrights and producers, most of them female, filed into a Midtown Manhattan theater Monday night, they expected to hear some concrete evidence that women who are authors have a tougher time getting their work staged than men. And they did. But they also heard that women who are artistic directors and literary managers are the ones to blame.

I grew increasingly more grumpy as I read the story, which details a study that asked male and female artistic directors to rate identical scripts with male and female names attached. The surprising finding (at least, the one reported by the NY Times and others in the media) was that female artistic directors were the ones giving lower ratings to women.

The questions about the likely reception of a play intend to measure customer discrimination (by the audience, in this case) and co-worker discrimination (by the actors). They are not measures of what the respondent himself or herself thinks about the play... All it means is that they believe the audience and the workers in the theater are less accepting of female playwrights than of male playwrights. Male respondents don't believe this, but then they don't have the same life experiences as the female respondents...

Suppose you come and interview me about authors, say, and ask me to tell which ones I think are really good and what their future prospects might be. And I give you some female and some male names of writers I like and regard as equally good and then tell you that the female ones have not as great prospects as the male ones. Then you go out and write that THIS PROVES I'M THE REASON FOR THEIR NOT-SO-GREAT PROSPECTS! That's pretty much how this whole thing works: To notice discrimination is to be guilty of it.

The two great goals of my childhood were to play for the New York Yankees, and the become President of the United States. I have yet to accomplish either of these things, but it occurred to me today to wonder - which will happen first? A woman in major league baseball, or a woman in the White House?

Going into the office today I walked right into the middle of an uncritical wankfest about how chicks dig bad guys because they're all insecure and they don't know what's good for them. Set my teeth immediately on edge but I didn't want to butt into anyone's personal life so I left it well alone. Then someone brought up some evo psych study that supposedly proves that this behavior would have been adaptive back in the day, and I could not keep quiet.

This is what I said, in a slightly more polite way:

1) We have no reason to believe that this phenomenon even exists. The only time I ever hear about it is from whiny-ass Nice Guys who can't deal with the fact that no one wants to date them and have to pretend like it's a problem with the women. (They never seem to get that this sort of condescension and entitlement might in fact be what's driving women away!) Yes, some women like guys who treat them badly. Some men like women who treat them badly. While we're at it, some women like women who treat them badly, some men like men who treat them badly, and some genderqueer folks like all sorts of people who treat them badly. Sensing a pattern here? The only reason there's a cultural narrative around irresistible bad boys is bias in who gets to tell their stories. I know plenty of girls who've pined after guys in terrible relationships. The difference is they generally don't feel the need to make it about all-men-ever and even if they did, they don't have the platform from which to speak about it.

2) Real "bad guys" - i.e. abusers and manipulators - do exist. And women do keep going back to them. Why? Because they are scared and feeling powerless and our society does very little to offer them support or condemn their abusers. How *dare* people even come *close* to implying that this is somehow a problem with women? God, look at that logic. Men wouldn't be bad guys if women didn't secretly like it? Men wouldn't be abusers if women didn't want them to be? Sickening.

3) And don't you pretend to hide behind the mantle of science here. I do find value in evolutionary psychology but the field has a disturbing tendency towards just-so stories. And unfortunately the field is really conservative - they start from "this is how the world is" and work backwards to figure out why that would be. Problem is that like most people their privileged, narrow worldview doesn't actually represent how the world is. Really, sometimes it seems like the main purpose of evo psych is to justify sexism.

Just goes to show what sort of biased, lazy thinking goes on even in the most prestigious places among people nominally devoted to finding truth. Well done, Harvard.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

All you need to do is sign the pledge, pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009 (Ada Lovelace Day). It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited.

This may be a slight stretch, but I'm going to pick as my 'tech' heroine Mahzarin Banaji. Although she's primarily a psychologist (and more of a social psychologist than a neuroscientist), she's well known for developing the Implicit Association Test, which you can take here. The IAT is a way of measuring people's unconscious biases by asking them to sort people into categories and measuring small but consistent differences in error rates and reaction times. For instance, it takes me a little bit longer to sort non-white faces into the category "American" then into the category "foreign". The IAT has been used to probe a number of different prejudices - including the tendency of people to not see women as scientists and technologists. At a time when public disavowal of prejudice is the norm, yet discrimination seems to keep on keeping on, I think her work is especially relevant.

[Banaji's] implicit association experiments have shown that even female scientists can unconsciously associate men with terms like “astronomy” and “chemistry” and women with “music” and “history.”

Knowing this prejudice well, Banaji says she always goes out of her way to support aspiring female students in science.

“For younger women whose identity as women in science is not fully formed, I need to keep an eye out,” Banaji says. “If somebody like that comes along and asks, ‘I wanna give up mathematics for social studies,’ [I would suggest to her] ‘well, hold on, maybe you should go. But maybe you shouldn’t.’”

I swear to god, if one more guy says something "ironically" sexist to me, about me, or even anywhere near me, I am going to staple a fucking shredder to my vag and set out to castrate the entire male population.

There are a couple at Gwen's apartment, so I picked one up and flipped through it. At first it was merely annoying - all stories about socialites and how to decorate your summer homes. There was an article about Chris Evert that was actually what made me pick the damn thing up, but it ended up being about how her style had changed over time. I would rather read about how her tennis game changed.

Anyway, this was all fairly unoffensive, inasmuch as one can read glowing praise of how eco-friendly some rich chick's six cars are without being offended, until I reached the "health and beauty" section.

One article on micro-surgery. Which is cosmetic surgery that no one notices you've had - small, slow changes to the tip of the nose, the jaw, the sides of the eyes. Another article on brides buying botox or boob jobs for their bridesmaids. (I mean, really, Debi. You held out on us.) But the kicker? An article subtitled 'In the quest for beauty, has one body part been overlooked?'.

So, before you read the rest of this entry, I want you to do something. I want you to think of your five favorite movies - or your one favorite, or your ten favorite. Have a definitive list in your head. Okay?

There's this thing called the Bechdel Test, which comes from Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For. The test consists of three deceptively simple steps... to pass, the film must have:

1) At least two named female characters, who2) talk to each other about3) something other than a man.

This test is astonishingly hard to pass.

Here are my favorite movies:

Star WarsThere are two named female characters, Princess Leia and Beru Lars. I think this is it for the entire series, though I may be forgetting someone. Leia and Beru never meet, let alone talk. So, fail.

The Lion In WinterThere are two named females here, again - Eleanor and Alais, and they do talk to each other. Mostly they talk about Henry (although, to be fair, everyone in this movie mostly talks about Henry) but I am remembering that one scene where Eleanor is reminiscing about raising Alais, so this one passes.

ContactDespite having a kick-ass female lead in Ellie Arroway, I'm struggling to remember whether this movie has another named female. The book version would pass with flying colors - Ellie has various scientific, political and religious conversations with, among others, the female President of the United States and her good friend, a female scientist. But who is there in the movie? IMDB tells me there's a character named Rachel Constantine, and since pretty much everyone in the movie talks with Ellie, I'm willing to bet she does, too. And since Ellie almost never talks about men, I'm willing to bet it's not about a man. So! I give this movie a pass, even if I can't remember the specific scene.

All The President's MenYeah, not a chance. Fail.

The Philadelphia StoryThere are several named females, and although they do primarily spend their time talking about men, it is a romantic comedy, and anyway I think there must be a conversation between Tracy and her mother, or Tracy and Liz, that doesn't revolve around a man. So, another pass, but a tentative one.

So... 3/5?

Notably, all five of these movies would pass the reverse - they all contain scenes, most of them many, with two men discussing something other than a woman. They pass the reverse easily, whereas I have to struggle to come up with scenes that allow them to pass the actual Bechdel test.

Also interesting, two of the three films that do pass the test are older films - The Lion In Winter is from 1968, and the Philadelphia Story from 1940.

What are your favorite films? Do they pass the test? I'd be really interested to see.

If there's one thing I've gotten out of the past few months of brain-meltingly frustrating political debates, it's the realization that most discussions have absolutely nothing to do with facts, logic, or even ideology. Very rarely do you even get to the point where you're talking directly about the issue you disagree on. It's all a fantastic exercise in framing the debate so only you can possibly be right. Or, failing that, you just aggressively miss the point.

It's a psychological gold mine. So I ought to just step back, delete my variations on "That wasn't what I was saying at all, you assmouthed troll!" and treat this scientifically. That is, however, easier said and done.

I also seriously wish people would get over being called sexist. I don't mind being called racist - mostly because whoever's calling me that is usually right. I don't see why being called out for sexist behavior is such a big deal - it's not like I'm accusing you of kidnapping girl scouts. Everyone fucks up. But all of a sudden it's "How dare you call me sexist!" and "You're just distracting from real sexism!" as though I ought to keep mum about any and all sexism I see until I'm sure everyone I've ever met will agree with me that it's totally wrong - which, somebody somewhere thought this was all in good fun, so we'll probably be waiting a while.

News flash, folks: as ego-hurty as it is to realize you've accidentally oppressed someone (or even to be accused when you really weren't) it's worse to be oppressed.

Ugh. Anyway. I'll update in a bit about this past weekend, and you'll get to hear the exciting story of Drunken Shauna and the Bay Area Regional Transit System. With bonus pictures of Quayleman and cops doing kegstands. Stay tuned!

I like basketball. A lot. And I'm good at soccer. I could spend a whole day playing tennis, or swimming, and I've even been known to enjoy frisbee and football.

But I really, really love baseball.

I love throwing the ball. I love throwing hard and fast and the loud smack it makes when it lands in someone else's glove. I love catching fly balls. Not easy fly balls, but the ones you have to run for, diving forward or reaching out, over the back, Willie Mays style. I'm not much of a fan of baserunning, although collisions at home can be cool.

But I really, really I love hitting baseballs.

There is something about just the swing. This is going to sound crazy to those of you who haven't experienced it, but there is something inherently delicious in swinging the bat. I don't have my bat with me in Sacto and I never brought it to college, but sometimes at home I would just take it out and stand in the middle of a room and swing it. There's no way to describe it except I think there must be endorphins released by my body when I swing it. It's like getting a hug, or something.

And when you're actually swinging at a ball... in a game... with the game on the line...

I used to be really into baseball. A lot more than now. There was one summer, when I was fourteen, when I played on two softball teams and a baseball team. One of the softball teams was a pity thing. It was my school team, and we were terrible, to the point where I got more hits than everyone else combined. The baseball team was an all boys team. I got a lot of stares at the games. We never played against another team with a girl. Some of the kids on the team made fun of me, others were cool about it. I was only an okay player (it was weird switching to smaller balls, longer basepaths, overhand pitching) but I cleaned the fuck up in batting practice, which I think helped them respect me. Inasmuch as they could respect me. Fourteen year old boys aren't really built for respect.

The third softball team was a traveling team. And when I say traveling, I mean traveling. We went up to Massachusetts and down to Virginia, and played teams from as far away as Florida, Ohio, Maine. Once school let out, we played 6-10 games a week, and every weekend was a tournament weekend. It was intense, but it was fun. I even started lifting weights to increase my power... my teammates and I would go to the gym to bulk up.

That wasn't the life for me, though. One season of that was enough. When I got to high school I decided I'd rather be on the debate team than the softball team. A lot of my teammates were playing for college scholarships, though. That, and love of the game. I remember our best player, Amanda. She hit around .500, even in our league, where pitchers regularly threw at 60 or 70 mph, which is about as fast as fastpitch softball goes. She was a home run hitter, she had more extra base hits than singles, she had a great arm and great instincts. She was named to the North Jersey Little League All Star team and actually it was she that made me join my own town's Little League team - I didn't know girls could do that until I met her. Most of the other girls just played softball, though. Girls are shunted towards softball. It's weird, 'cause they don't just make the field smaller like they do in basketball or the game shorter like they do in tennis. They fundamentally change it.

As good as Amanda was, I met girls who were better. As much as I loved baseball, I met girls who loved it more.

And it makes me so fucking angry.

There are thirty major league teams, each of which has a farm system with at least four more teams. That's 120 teams. Each usually has at least 40 players. That's 480 players. If we assume an average career turnover rate of, what, five years? That's 4,800 ballplayers in the last fifty years. Probably the number is more like 10,000, maybe even 20,000. Think of all the flame-outs who spend a season in the farm system and give up. All those boys signed on a decent high school career and a whim.

How many girls have ever been signed to play even a single day of single A ball?

0.

And don't give me any of that boys are physically superior bullshit. Because that's what it is, complete fucking bullshit. Maybe there'll never be a female Barry Bonds but there sure as hell is a female Chuck Knoblauch, a female Omar Visquel, a female Pee Wee Reese, a female Phil Rizzuto. I'm naming Hall of Famers here. I'm naming World Champions. I'm naming people who made millions of dollars from playing a game, a game which they loved.

But hey, a girl who loves baseball can always go coach a high school team, right? It's like practically the same thing.

I love baseball. I was never good enough to play professionally but I knew girls who were. I never wanted to play ball professionally (not after I turned ten, anyway) but I knew girls who did. But they couldn't. Because they were girls.

I know there are a lot of worse things happening to women out there, I know that in the broad scheme of things discrimination in professional sports is not that big a deal, but it still pisses me the fuck off that when I want to watch a ball game all I see are men.

Because don't you know that men are the only ones good enough to play baseball? Don't you know that a woman couldn't even dream of being good enough to even try to play with the men?

But that's okay, you can have your girls only team, your girls only league. It'll be just like the boys team, except they won't pay you as much, or come to watch you, and probably it'll fold after a few years. And if there's a sport where women have physical advantages compared to men, well, we'll be sure not to care about those! Oh, and while we're at it, we'll turn sporting events into dick-measuring contests. We'll tell you you're only a yankee fan because you think Derek Jeter's cute. If you come to a game we'll chant at you to take off your shirt.

When I turn on the t.v., I see men dominating the political sphere, the entertainment world. I'm not going to turn it on to watch men dominating the sport I love. I'll be damned if I give major league baseball the time of day again.

Why yes, I did get back from work just now. I love when I call people on the east coast after an evening scan, because to them, I'm not leaving work at the impressive but still somewhat reasonable 8 p.m. - oh, no. I'm leaving at the absolutely inhumane 11 p.m. and they're going to call up my supervisors and give them a piece of their minds, so there!

Anyway.

If there is one thing I dislike about this extended primary it's the absolute bollocks that is race and gender analysis. Absolutely nobody can seem to get it right. You have Clinton and her surrogates making racist smears, Obama and his surrogates making sexist jokes and insinuating that if Bill hadn't fallen in love with Hillary, she'd still be barefoot in a kitchen somewhere, and now you have airheaded pundits talking about the race card and the gender card as if race and gender were mere demographic quirks and not the basis for real discrimination in our society. One thing that really gets me is how many white feminists have come out and said, pretty much, "Women are SO much more oppressed than minorities, and if you disagree, you're a BAD FEMINIST." Thank you, Geraldine Ferraro, Gloria Steinem. I always wanted fewer feminist heroes, so thanks for taking yourselves off my list.

Well, fuck. Clinton's won Ohio, apparently, and it looks like she may win Texas.

It's not that I dislike Clinton. I think a lot of the criticisms leveled at her can be pretty fairly leveled at Obama (and vice-versa - I don't think she's really any more experienced than he is, just like I don't think he's more likely to bring transformative change). My support for Obama pretty much boils down to his being slightly more nuanced and less belligerent on foreign policy, and a little better on telecomm policy, domestically. I also think that a win for him would help down-ticket races and swing a little power to the Dean camp in the fight for the soul of the Democratic party.

But I still like Clinton. I have reservations about her, and I like Obama a little more, but I still like Clinton. Go ahead, tell me I'm thinking with my vag, but I've got a soft spot for her.

But if she succeeds now it will be after weeks of going pretty harshly negative and the last thing this race needs is more negativity. I don't mind it continuing, per se - I think a drawn-out battle has been great for focusing attention on the democrats and increasing turnout -but the less decisive the eventual victor is, the less likely the loser's supporters will be to fall into line behind the other. Not to mention I have serious qualms with how she went negative - it can be described as disengenuous at best, racist at worst.

I would just like to get this over with. I would just like to move on from criticizing each other to criticizing McCain. I mean, there'll be months and months and months of that, but for now, I'm sick of the ads, the nauseating politically commentary (I'm pretty sure I read the World's Most Misogynistic Editorial in the Post earlier this week) and the back-biting.

On a completely unrelated note, a while back I made an LJ post where I talked about how I find the restrictive aspect of vegetarianism/veganism unnerving because of how it reminds me of disordered eating. Well, apparently the topic has come up on some of the feminism and fat acceptance blogs I read, due to a book called "Skinny Bitch in the Kitch" which (allegedly) uses fat-shaming techniques to get people to go veg. There's some interesting commentary here and here.

Okay, I'm editing this. I was think about this while I was in the shower (I take very productive showers) and I think that more than anything else, this type of book hurts the animal rights movement. It explicitly encourages the idea that there are good foods and bad foods, that you're a bad person if you eat the bad foods, that other people will judge you if you eat the bad foods, that no one will love you if you eat the bad foods. And let me tell you, that is not a recipe for success. I have to listen to it every day at work, from otherwise reasonably rational people. "I lost nine pounds this month!" "I can't eat that, KC will be mad at me." "You eat so much chocolate. I wish I could eat that much chocolate." What you eat and what you don't eat is a huge fucking deal and linking weight loss to veganism only makes escaping that cycle that much harder. And you don't want people engaging those thought patterns in an attempt to become vegan because it will make them a) miserable and b) completely unsuccessful.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of people who aren't vegans or vegetarians right now would be if they didn't have such complicated relationships with food - due, of course, to the fucked up societal messages endorsed by the above book. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I think I would have at least tried being vegan if I wasn't worried about the inevitable good food/bad food complexes that emerge and about people judging me if I fail. I've had people tell me "you've just got to view it as 'not food'" and they don't seem to get that for 90% of the population that just will not. work.

I've had a couple people mention to me over the past week that they've seen me in this photo project. I wrote a fairly long reply to one of the e-mails I got, which I thought I'd repost here:

This project is basically just a way of saying, "You know when people say there's an obesity crisis? That too many people are overweight? This is what obese/overweight looks like. This is the 'crisis'." Because my BMI says I'm overweight, but I'm happy, I'm healthy, I'm attractive, and yet there are people out there who think I - and all the other happy, healthy, attractive people in the photostream - need to change. And so they talk about it on tv and talk about how fat our kids are until everyone is parroting the same bullshit and all it does is shame people and push people towards eating disorders, which kill far more people than being overweight does. And sorry to go on about this, but you *did* ask.

If, for some reason, you need to be convinced that fat-hatred is endemic, despicable and unwarranted, try this link (for some real awfulness, check out the comments section).

I really do like this project, and I'm proud of my participation in it, even if it's just a little internet thing. Go check it out.

After yet another argument about surnames with a friend - I think it's my own hyphenated last name that brings people's latent opinions about the subject to the fore - I've decided to poll my lj friends again. So, if you please, answer as many of these questions as you can in as much detail as you like.

(For clarity's sake, please specify the gender (or variation thereof) you identify as, and what gender(s) your partner would likely be. Also, from now on "married" is going to refer to marriage, civil unions, or any sort of life-partnership, whether or not it's recognized by church or state, so long as it's serious enough that name-changing issues would come into play.)

If you were to get married, would you definitely keep your own last name? Definitely not? If your answer is "it depends", what does it depend on? How attached the other person is to their own last name? Whether you think their last name is pretty or not?

If you have kids, would you want them to have your last name? Your partner's last name? Would you hyphenate? If you have issues with hyphenation, what are they?

Do you think decisions about changing your name and the last name of your kids are inherently political or feminist? Do you think they should be? Does it bother you when friends and family make surname decisions you disagree with?

Oh, and while you're at it - What is your last name and how did your parents decide to give it to you? What decisions did they come up with for themselves? How do you feel about those decisions and how attached are you to your name?

My new roommate has a pretty nice DVD collection, so last night I picked out The Virgin Suicides and sat down to watch. I realize it is 4 a.m. but I'm going to attempt a review anyway. My apologies for any incoherence.

I think what it really comes down to is the title. How many meanings does the title have? Surely more than one, since a literal interpretation is incorrect - Lux Lisbon, as the film delights in detailing, is not a virgin by any definition by the time she kills herself. Well, then, perhaps the intent is to focus on the Lisbon girls' youth and purity, on the innocence which makes them symbols of teenage girls everywhere. But there is a deeper significance to the word and the concept "virgin", if one chooses to see it - virgin is the mystification and idealization of women, virgin is the definition of women by men, virgin is silencing and stultifying and ultimately violent. Virgin is the heart and soul of the story and my question is, did the people who made the film realize that? Because most reviews I've seen seem to entirelymiss it.

In the end, the suicides are completely unexplained. You get glimpses of the girls' unhappiness - their incredibly strict parents, the boy who has sex with Lux on a football field and is gone the next morning - but no real reason for their actions. Reasons? They barely even have personalities. The narrator is a schoolboy, one of several schoolboys who watch them from a window across the street, who worship them decades after their deaths. From the movie's final monologue:

What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts -- a clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. We began the impossible process of trying to forget them... So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been or that they were girls...but only that we had loved them...and they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

The movie rightly condemns the way the media objectifies and sensationalizes their deaths, and highlights the suffocating strictness of their parents and their focus on keeping the girls pure, innocent, virgin. But it is unclear whether it realizes that the narrators themselves have a role in this process. Look at how the final monologue is worded. "Hear us calling them out", "thinking only of herself", "we will never put them back together". In the end this about the boys, not the girls, and while this is fine - the boys are people too - it is not a choice that can stand in isolation. Why tell this impossibly horrible story in a way that renders it "beautifully tragic"? Why silence the Lisbon girls? As some sort of meta context for the silencing that led to their suicides?

I'm not sure I can give the writer and director that much credit. Maybe I'm underestimating them. But from where I stand, this is one of the most despicable movies I've seen in a long, long time.

Got an e-mail from another lab at NIH which wanted to set up an interview. That means I probably won't be getting back to the Valley until Tuesday (and also raises the possibility that they'd want me to start this summer and I'd have to give up my summer plans). Still, any job opportunity is something to be happy about, especially since my student loan statement came in the mail. $16,625! Makes me wonder how people with less financially stable careers planned are going to make out.

Career vs. Children: The article is a case study in self-hatred, but it's the comments section that make me want to rip out my fallopian tubes and strangle someone with them. What she has so maturely, so providently grasped already - Lo! at such young age! - is that the concept of "PhD scientist" and "mom" are mutually exclusive. And if you haven't got your fill, you can read some nasty comments here, too.